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Faculty

Christopher Stone is Associate Professor of Arabic and Head of the Arabic Program. He received his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2002) in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University where he specialized in Arabic language, literature and culture. His dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award for the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association in 2003, and the book based on it -- Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: Fairouz and the Rahbani Nation -- was a Middle East Report Editor's Pick. In the spring of 2008 he was a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt where he started his current project on Egyptian popular culture, a project he continued as an NEH Fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt in 2013. He is currently working on several literary translation projects as well. He is currently the Literature book review editor at The International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES).

Alexander Elinson,Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature andDirector of the Hunter College Summer Arabic Program, received his M.A. (1998) from the University of Washington in Seattle, and Ph.D. (2004) in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. His research interests cut across the Middle East and North Africa, and include Arabic and Hebrew literature from the pre-Islamic to the modern period. His book entitledLooking Back at al-Andalus: the poetics of loss and nostalgia in medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature is published by Brill. Professor Elinson has published articles, reviews and translations on the Arabic and Hebrew strophic poem (zajal andmuwashshah), rhymed prose narrative (maqama), and modern Arabic poetry and narrative in numerous peer-reviewed journals. In addition to projects dealing with late medieval Muslim Spain and North Africa (stemming from research conducted with a Fulbright fellowship in 2010), he is currently working on a book project focusing on writing practices in Morocco, specifically the use of Moroccan colloquial Arabic in novels, shorts stories, poetry, translation, and journalistic writing. Professor Elinson is on leave until the Fall 2015 semester.

Adjunct instructor Faris Al Ahmad is a graduate student at CUNY Graduate Center’s Middle Eastern Studies program. He has a B.A. in English language with a major in translation between Arabic and English from Damascus University. Faris was born in Syria and lived between Damascus and Beirut until he came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in 2010 to teach Arabic in Pennsylvania. He has taught both Arabic and English as second languages since 2006 in many schools in the US and Syria. He also worked as a linguist developing Levantine Arabic textbook materials. Faris Al Ahmad's current research interests include modern Arab and Muslim intellectuals, contemporary Islamic thought, classic Islamic thought, and Islam and politics.

Miss Werchefeni is originally from Sfax, a city in the southeast of Tunisia (North-Africa) and is a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) this year at Hunter College. She received her B.A in Fundamental English: Linguistics, Civilization and Literature from FLSHS (The Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Sfax). She studied as well in the Preparatory Institute of Languages in Tunis. She also has a certificate in English Language Teaching from SELT Academy and Oxford. She taught English as a Foreign Language for various levels in Tunisia and last year she was teaching English in Turkey in a private Secondary School. She is also Trainer and Facilitator with International Non-Governmental Organizations. She is working on Youth Leadership, capacity building, peace promotion, Human Rights, and Volunteerism. She is passionate about learning and sharing to bring positive changes to the world and build bridges of mutual understanding between nations.